The Wonder Of Dante

The mystery of The Divine Comedy has little to do with the encoded games of hide-and-seek that Brown plays with readers in his best-selling mystery thriller. It has to do instead with the poem’s staying power. How is it possible—after so many centuries of manhandling by commentators, translators, and imitators, after so much use and abuse, selling and soliciting—that the Comedy still has not finished saying what it has to say, giving what it has to give, or withholding what it has to withhold? What is the source of its boundless generosity?

It takes Charles Baudelaire to help us understand how a work of art can offer itself to everyone and belong finally to no one. “What is art?” he asks in one of the first notes of Mon coeur mis à nu. His answer: “prostitution,” by which he means indiscriminate giving of the self. The artwork’s prostitution is “sacred,” not profane, for it offers itself freely. Thus art has an essential bond with love, which shares with art the “need to go outside of oneself.” “All love is prostitution,” writes Baudelaire. In that respect both art and love partake of the self-surpassing generosity through which God gives himself to the world: “The most prostituted being of all, the being par excellence, is God, since he is the supreme friend of every individual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.”

One reason why The Divine Comedy remains the most generous work in literary history is because it brings together these three phenomena—God, love, and art—in a first-person story where they flow into and out of one another promiscuously, such that it is impossible finally to distinguish between the Comedy’s art and “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Even if one knows nothing about the Christian theology that structures the poem, the love that keeps it moving sweeps the reader up along with it.

In its architectural weight and grandeur The Divine Comedy appears to modern readers as a great Gothic cathedral made of solid verse. One has a sense that, a thousand years from now, its nine circles of Hell and nine heavenly spheres will still be there, while our diminutive modern society, with its fleeting concerns and anxieties, will have long disappeared. Yet strange as it may seem, this monumental poem has one overriding, all-consuming vocation, namely to probe, understand, and represent the nature of motion in its spiritual and cosmic manifestations.

As you know, I’ve been reading the Divine Comedy, and figured I would be blogging about it. I find, though, that it’s such an overwhelming experience that if I started to write about it here, I wouldn’t know where to stop. I shared this above passage with a teacher friend, who responded:

N.D. Wilson in his Notes from the Tilt-a-whirl gives several philosophers’ definitions of art. Chesterton said, for example, that “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.” Wilson went on to give his definition of art: “Art is.” That is to say, God’s artistry is the essence of ontology. Each moment of being is yet a thousand divine paint strokes, musical notes, sonnets, and death-defying sculptures. Dante’s Divine Comedy situates our poetic appetites so that we may see this very happy truth. And yet I hadn’t a single teacher urge me to read it until graduate school. There ought to be a tenth circle of hell made especially for bad educators, though strong arguments could be made that each level holds at least a bit of what it takes to be a bad educator.

I wish I had encountered the Commedia earlier in life, but I am so very, very grateful to have it now, in the middle of my life, when I needed it the most. In confession Saturday night, I told my priest that I was reading a particular canto of the Purgatorio, and realized that the sin being purged in it was a particularly acute sin for me. The Commedia really is a long occasion of examination of conscience, as well as being thrilling and gorgeous. I’ve never read anything like it.

The essay in the NYRB contains this passage, which illuminated a mysterious but fleeting image in To The Wonder:

The great metaphysical doctrine underlying The Divine Comedy is that time is engendered by motion. Like the medieval scholastic tradition in which he was steeped, Dante subscribed to Plato’s notion that time, in its cosmological determinations, is “a moving image of eternity.” He subscribed furthermore to the Platonic and Aristotelian notion that the truest image of eternity in the material world is the circular motions of the heavens. Thus in Dante’s Paradiso, the heavenly spheres revolve in perfect circles around the “unmoved Mover,” namely God.

In the final analysis there are two kinds of motion in the world for Dante: the predetermined orderly motion of the cosmos, which revolves around the Godhead, and the undetermined motion of the human will, which is free to choose where to direct its desire—either toward the self or toward God. Yet be it self-love or love of God (love of neighbor is a declension of the latter), what moves the heavens is the same force that moves both sinners and saints alike, namely amor.

The basic “plot” of The Divine Comedy has to do with the pilgrim’s efforts to complete a long, self-interrogating, and transformative journey at the end of which his inner being—which, like human history, suffers from the perversion of self-love—becomes harmonized with the love that moves the universe. Salvation means nothing more, and nothing less, than such harmonization.

In the Malick film, there is a quick shot of the priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), putting a disassembled clock back together in the presence of Neil (Ben Affleck). I’ve been vexed by that image, wondering what it means. Yesterday in liturgy, I thought, “Father Quintana holds eternity in his hands” — the clock as a Eucharistic symbol. But that didn’t sound quite right.

This passage above makes the symbol clear to me. Fr. Quintana and Neil are both men who have lost the palpable sense of love’s presence (for the priest, divine love; for Neil, the love of his lover). Because Fr. Quintana has his faith as the center of his existence, and orders his life around that, he is moving forward to a goal, even though he is moving through the darkness. Because Neil directs his will to no discernible thing, he is inconstant, his life unstable. Love moves them both forward, but only one of them is moving toward something, towards harmony with something (or rather, Someone), as opposed to moving forward randomly.

Both of these men are lost in a dark wood, but only one of them is on his way through it to the other side. This image from the film shows that Fr. Quintana is ordering time, in this Dantean sense, by moving towards harmony with the Divine, with Love itself. Neil is just observing passively, lost without a guide, drifting.

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10 Responses to The Wonder Of Dante

I read Dante as an adult, in my mid 30s. My first exposure was the Allen Mandelbaum translation. That one gives you the original Tuscan on the facing page, and you can savor the sounds in the original.

I’ve become a collector of Dante translations. Dorothy Sayers has one in terza rima.

Rod, you should pick up some alternate translations, and by all means the Mandelbaum. I think they will deepen your pleasure of the work as a masterpiece of poetic art.

I first read Dante when I was thirteen and knew virtually nothing about his world so it struck me as entertaining and nothing more. Yeah the devils were cool and it was cool with popes and bishops getting roasted, but that was about it. The rest of it, Purgatorio and Paradiso were, like, why is he writing this?

But the funny thing for me is now, 50 years later, I still see it the same way, a bizarre political commentary by an unfortunate poet who got caught up in politics and had a thing about his childhood sweetheart. As far as Renaissance authors go, I think I will stick Niccolo Machiavelli.

I think you said you were reading the Hollander version for Purgatoria and Paradiso. Are you reading the notes from Hollander, or some other notes? Also do you intend to read through the Divine Comedy again? I am not much of a rereader (there is too much great literature and history out there that I want to read), but I am almost finished with Paradiso and can see myself coming back to the Comedy again in my life.

[NFR: Reading the Hollander, and their notes, but also the notes of the Ciardi. I expect I will be rereading the Comedy for all my life. — RD]

I’ve only seen the first 20 minutes or so of the film, plus the trailer posted below, but now that you’ve mentioned this I notice lots of things moving in circular motion. Even the trailer is chock full of it. It seems to be a pretty pervasive image throughout the whole, and now I can’t stop noticing it. Everything in the film is wheels within wheels…

On a side note, does anybody else get the impression that Malick presents a slightly more high-brow version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl? Would Zooey Deschanel really be that out of place in a dialogue-less film like this twirling and dancing unselfconsciously across epic landscapes, representing some kind of free-spirited romantic ideal to bring healing to some soulful man whose life has been weighed down by tragedy? Does anybody else get that vibe, or is it just me?

[NFR: Your comment makes me think that the twirling in TTW represents someone who circles around herself. It gives the illusion of freedom, but in truth just makes you dizzy. — RD]

After reading all the recent references to Dante here, I decided to pick up a copy. I am encouraged by pacopond’s recommendation of the Mandelbaum translation, as that’s the one that I got – comparing a couple in the store it seemed the pleasantest to read. Back in college I was supposed to read the whole thing, or very near it, but really only took the Inferno seriously – I was too spiritually immature at the time to be much interested in what was depicted in the Paradiso, and even the Purgatorio didn’t hold too much interest for me. I hope to have progressed a little since then, and am looking forward to taking it on once I finish my current read.

[NFR: Your comment makes me think that the twirling in TTW represents someone who circles around herself. It gives the illusion of freedom, but in truth just makes you dizzy. — RD]

That’s a good thought. I know Malick at this point is dealing almost in archetypes and is telling his story without having to rely on words so some of the action will seem a little over-the-top in a superficial viewing. Still, on that superficial level it does have a certain sorta MPDG quality 🙂

From what I’ve seen of the movie so far another circle appears to be the cycle she finds herself trapped in where her lovers ultimately stray to other women. This seems to suggest that misdirected love is in a way it’s own punishment. Like those in the Inferno’s circles they suffer in some way from what they indulged in life. The levels of hell are discreet and closed off from one another and lead only back upon themselves in endless, repetitive cycle, whereas the levels of Purgatory all lead eventually upward to the next level and ultimately to Paradise. I think the flat, endless plains of Oklahoma are given as a contrast in this sense to the steps of ascent that lead ‘to the Wonder’.

At any rate, those are my initial impressions and I’m going to set aside some time to give some closer attention to the movie. Like Charles, I read the Inferno when I was 14 or so because it was about Hell, and that sounded really cool. I’m pretty sure I didn’t absorb all the lessons from it at that age, so I’ll have to try to circle back to it and read it again.

Thanks for the response, Rod. As I said, I love your posts on Dante and the Divine Comedy. I think it is such an amazing poem though when I tell others I am reading it, they look at me like I am crazy. I like the Ciardi notes, too, but I also have been supplementing my reading with Sayers’ notes though I have read the Hollander translation for each of the canticles (yes, it’s confusing, sometimes, to read with all this material, but I think the notes make the poem worthwhile to read).